Eien ni
by kaliawai512
Summary: Her son's life had always been a mystery. But from the moment he solved that strange Puzzle, everything was different. Now he's back from Egypt, and everything has changed again. And she wonders if a mother's love is enough for her to give.


**Thanks so much to all who have given me feedback on my other YuGiOh stories, and one kind reviewer who's given me a great suggestion for a new piece. My appreciation to you all!  
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**I've yet to run into a fic that goes into this sort of thing. Very similar, yes, but not quite this; though I'm almost sure they're **_**out **_**there somewhere, I'm surprised I haven't found one yet. This isn't exactly a standard point of view, nor is it one that was really built upon in the anime at all (not even much in the manga). But I felt it might be interesting to write from. So I gave it a try. It's shorter than most of my pieces, and more reflection than straight-out scene, but I hope it holds some kind of meaning.**

**It's a new POV, so I hope I was able to manage that, too. There isn't much out there about this character; I just used what I could and characterized the rest on my own. We'll see how that goes.**

**There's not really much to warn about here. Reading a few paragraphs in should tell you that any **_**thought **_**of romance in this fic is **_**completely non-existent. **_**The rating is for references to very vague violence and angst, and despite the reflection, this is slightly post-canon. For the record, according to my research, Japanese people tend to call their in-laws "Otousan"/"Okaasan" or some variation, like their own parents. You'll see what I mean.**

"**Eien ni" means "Forever."**

**That's it! I hope you all enjoy it, and please leave a review when you finish! I really love to hear what you guys think. And if you have anything in particular you think I should write about next, please, drop me a note. I **_**love **_**suggestions.**

_Eien ni_

"_I wonder … will that boy be okay?"_

She had only actually _said _it once, but the question had been ruminating in her mind for a long time before and a long time after. It was a natural, almost instinctual concern, she supposed, even though she told herself just as much as everyone else that she was being silly, that there was nothing wrong with him. He was fine.

But he _wasn't _fine.

She pulled her needle once more through the hem of the thick pants she _knew _she should have taken in to be professionally mended, but she had for some reason insisted on doing it herself. The first thing she had pulled out of his suitcase when he returned—he had just dropped his suitcase in the living room and smiled and went upstairs to his room—were the pants. Torn on the bottom. Left unnoticed, and if she hadn't picked them out they likely would have gone on like that for several more weeks.

She wondered not for the first time what exactly he had been _doing _in Egypt to tear his pants again.

Sugoroku had been the one to manage the trip, organize it, and for the most part, pay for it with what spare money he had collected from the shop. He hadn't even _told _her about it until a few days before, and it had taken every bit of her own restraint to stop herself from forbidding that boy from going.

In fact, that was what she had been _going _to tell Sugoroku. But then _he _had walked in, and looked at her like he had heard the whole thing and knew what she was going to say, and the look on his face cracked that strong outer shell she had built up just enough for her to allow it.

No one had actually told her, but she knew that trip to Egypt was important, even if they wouldn't say why. She knew it had to be done.

And now, it was done, and he was home, safe and sound.

And yet … he wasn't.

She broke the thread with her teeth and tied off the end, holding out her work to examine it. It didn't blend perfectly on these pants he liked to wear—not _leather, _per se, but as close to it as his school uniform policies would allow—but it was good enough. She stood and started toward the staircase. She had already washed them, so now they just needed to be returned to their owner.

She paused, sighed, and ran a finger over the stitches.

_Yuugi …_

He had been so strange in the recent months. Before that, even—and she would swear to anyone and anything that he had _always _been strange, and she would attribute that fervently to his father's side of the family, for she couldn't pick out a single one of her own characteristics that he shared in personality or appearance—but it had all become so very different over the past year.

He would arrive home in strange states, confused, unsure, almost afraid. She was used to him coming home with scrapes and bruises, as she had been for many years, though nothing she ever did seemed to get him to talk about it and nothing she did ever _changed _it. But the scrapes and bruises started to be replaced with that inner turmoil. The sudden fear of things around him, the mundane, the harmless, seeing darkness in the corners and monsters under the bed.

Once he had come home with blood stained on the sleeve of his uniform, and not a cut in sight.

That evening she banged on his door for two hours straight, and when Sugoroku finally got the key to unlock it, she found him hidden under the covers, his dirtied jacket stuffed into the wastebasket and the golden pendant he always wore placed in the corner, as far away from him as it could be.

Yes. When he completed that pendant, it had all begun.

It wasn't like Sugoroku had _told _her he would be giving her son an ancient Egyptian artifact for his eighth birthday. She would have recommended another stuffed animal—maybe like that toy penguin he had gotten him when he turned five, he had loved that—or a jigsaw puzzle or even a new pair of shoes. But he had given the boy some ancient game, and with that game came stories of dark and powerful beings that she just _knew _would give him nightmares for years to come.

She had let it happen, though, and she only had herself to blame that she let it escalate to what it had become.

She hadn't had a problem with him wearing his new pendant when he finished it, once he assured her that it was safe, even if she didn't really believe him. She never got a call from the school about it breaking uniform policies, and as long as he didn't end up gauging an eye out with one of the corners of that miniature pyramid, he could continue his interesting little fashion statement.

But it wasn't as simple as that. It had _never _been as simple as that, and she had always known and she still hadn't done anything. Sugoroku ending up in a coma with no explanation, even when he woke up a couple of weeks later and got right back on his feet. Her son disappearing one evening when Sugoroku was still in the hospital with only a few words that he was going off to some island for a card game tournament—she had been cooking dinner and he had run out too fast for her to tell him to wait.

The tournaments didn't stop after he got home—apparently as first place champion, though he had no trophy to show for it. Not as if she had expected anything less. A gaming grandfather to a gaming grandson. And he was good at the game, if Sugoroku's enthusiasm and her son's incredible tendency to beat everyone who challenged him were any sign of it. She didn't understand the game. But she was proud of him.

It was all she could do to be proud of him.

But—

"Taking those up to Yuugi's room?"

She just about dropped the pants when she took the first step onto the staircase.

"Otousan!"

He didn't laugh. He looked at her and he blinked with those big old eyes. But she _knew _he was holding back a chuckle. And for that she gave him her best angry-mother face, and _that _made him laugh.

Sugoroku crossed his arms over his chest in a gesture very uncharacteristic of him, and he smiled. "That always gets your attention, doesn't it?"

"You could find a better way to ask without scaring the pants off of me!"

"Funny, I thought you were wearing a skirt."

She put a hand to her forehead and was suddenly grateful she had stopped getting those migraines after her son's tenth birthday. Sugoroku laughed at her again, and she really had to wonder how it was that someone so much her senior seemed to have a maturity level about twenty years behind her own.

"He's not in right now," he pointed out, and she could see for a split second the blatant resemblance between him and her husband when he winked and held out his index finger as if he was giving her some secretive piece of news. "Jounouchi came to pick him up about an hour ago. Took him to the arcade."

She adjusted the pants in her hands so they were less likely to slip, and took another step up. She lowered her brow. "I thought he had been staying in his room. Ever since he got back from that trip …"

Sugoroku smiled at her again. But there was something _different _about that smile, something _knowing, _and it made her want to grab the collar of his shirt and demand that he tell her what was going on. She didn't, though, and she waited with the pants draped over one arm for him to say the words she couldn't quite read behind his lips.

"It's good for him to get out." He looked at the ground as if there was something there very interesting and a little bit sad. "Be with his friends. He's going through a lot right now."

She raised an eyebrow and got _so close _to grabbing his collar. "Such as?"

He smiled again.

"Nothing, dear. Nothing."

Oh, how very much she wanted to scream.

Sugoroku turned around and walked back toward the shop front of the house. She reached out a hand to stop him, to tell him to wait, to tell her _anything _of what she wanted to know. But he didn't notice, and she stayed silent, and merely sighed with a volume fit to echo around the house once he had closed the door and left.

She started again up the stairs.

She heard the familiar jingling of the door to the shop through the walls, but she didn't pause on her way. She heard Sugoroku's voice greeting another customer, and she just shook her head. Running the shop at least gave him something to do, and it kept him from spending all day sitting around and becoming, as he had once called it, a "useless old fart." She didn't bother to tell him that not only did she think he was starting to sound senile, but she feared it was starting to rub off on her son.

The boy was getting older. She couldn't deny that, any more than she could deny that he still had yet to match her in height. But it was happening so quickly, and most of it seemed to happen while she had her back turned.

When he came back from that first card tournament, he had seemed somehow wiser, like some infinite knowledge had been gained over a trip that had lasted only a few days. His clothes had been absolutely filthy, and that Jounouchi had spent the next two weeks _rambling _about his apparent "second place" victory every time he came within half a kilometer of the game shop. Her son had started to go out with his friends more instead of spending so much time cooped up in his room, and she was glad.

But then he had started _talking_ in his room.

At first she had been quite certain that he had just invited a friend over early in the morning and not told her—not as if he told her much in the first place, so it wouldn't have surprised her. But upon listening closer, she would always notice that his voice was the _only _one she heard. She heard him chatting and arguing and sometimes laughing, and she would stand by his door for nearly an hour, just listening, hoping to catch an idea of who he was talking to.

There was never any other voice. And when she opened the door with the excuse of giving him a snack, she would find him in that new favorite black shirt and tight pants of his, sitting cross-legged alone on his bed with the pendant around his neck, looking at her as if he had just broken out of some deep trance.

And he would always deny that he had been doing anything more than reciting his homework assignments aloud.

Sugoroku, of course, was never in help at all.

She had expected that this trip to Egypt had been a lot more important than just school research or a quick vacation or any of the other things Sugoroku had tried to explain it away as. She had known that much from the beginning. She expected he would come back and talk to himself again, probably more than before, and he would go out on more strange outings with those friends of his, and he would grow further away from her still.

But he hadn't.

Something deep within her cringed, and she put a hand to her chest at the pain inside.

Oh, how she had interrogated Sugoroku when he walked in after her son returned. How she had begged him to go upstairs with her and take his temperature or just give him a good, long looking-at. Sugoroku had just given her sad smiles, similar to the emotions that hovered around her son, but not nearly as deep as within the boy.

She had seen him today at breakfast. He had only come down to grab the food and head back up to his bedroom, not listening to her protests or her insistent requests that he stay at the table. But she had finally gotten a look at him.

He was the same boy. He was still her son, through and through. He still had that strange spiky hair he had inherited from his father's side of the family, and he still had those big violet eyes that had kept their childlike innocence through all these years.

And yet that innocence was faded, something dark surrounding it. It scared her when she first got a clear look at it, as if someone had come in dressed up as her son and she had only just noticed. He smiled at her, and he greeted her with a voice gentle and sweet, but his voice was quiet, like his energy had all been drained out of him and now he was just an empty shell.

She had wanted so very badly to pull him into her arms like she did years ago and hug him until he was himself once more.

But she couldn't even bring herself to put a hand on his shoulder before he gave her another smile, waved with his free hand while the other carried his plate of eggs and toast, and headed back up toward his room.

She walked very slowly the rest of the way down the hall and to the bedroom door she only opened when she came to pick up dirty laundry. He left worn clothes outside his room most of the time, so she really had no need. It had been such a long time since she had come up here, and she paused outside his door with a hand hovering over the knob. Waiting. Wondering if inside, there was some answer to all she sought to understand.

She laughed at how silly she sounded, and with a breath in and out, she turned the knob.

The door creaked open like it did in those scary movies that used to run on television several years back, the ones her husband had always loved and she had always despised. She pushed the wood of it until it opened all the way for her, and she shifted the pants on her arm before stepping in in full.

If she had to describe the room in two words, they would have been "teenage boy." Not in the typical sense of the word. There were no posters of motorcycles or cars or movie stars on the wall, nor was it the dirtiest room she had ever seen—she had once visited Honda's apartment when she was trying to find her son during one of his tournaments, and _nothing _could compare to that.

She supposed she had come to associate anything he did with other boys his age, even though most of his life strayed so far from average teenagers. For once in so long, the cards he loved were not organized in stacks on his desk, nor was his usual deck sitting off to the side. There were clothes on the floor, though not very many of them—they were dirty, though, and the clothes she had washed and left by the stairs had not yet been put away. The bed, of course, was unmade.

She stood there in the doorway for a long time holding the pants. She felt, more than earlier, that she really had no business being in here. It was new and strange to her, even though her own room was only just down the hall.

But after nearly a minute, she walked inside, and she let the strangeness of the room surround her. She stared at it, and a little part of her expected to be attacked by a myriad of traps left for anyone who dared to intrude. Or maybe the mysterious person her son had been talking to, hiding in his closet or under his bed, ready to pop out at anyone who came inside.

She shook her head. Alright, now _that _was silly.

The desk was nearly empty now, as she supposed those missing cards had been put away when he returned from Egypt, and he rarely kept anything else there. He always used those cards, though. Every day. She didn't see a reason why he would have put them away.

There was only one thing left on the desk now. One thing set very carefully on the center, looking recently polished. The golden box she had seen over nine years before on her son's eighth birthday, the golden box that had held the beginnings to all this mess.

She knew, logically, that it wasn't that golden box that drew her forward toward the desk. She was just walking around the room, certainly, just looking around and seeing what had changed since the last time she had been in here. And maybe to make her son's bed while she was at it.

But a little part of her, maybe the leftover bits of her own mother still lingering around inside of her, smiled and shook its head and told her she needed to listen to her heart for once instead of her head, dearie. She wanted to smack that voice with her soup ladle. But instead she just walked forward and stared at the shimmering gold in the sunlight.

Something was wrong with her son.

She knew it. She had known it the moment he set foot in the house. And yet she couldn't _do _anything about it. She wanted to. More than anything in the world, she wanted to. But she couldn't. And that was just fact.

But that did not mean she was ready to accept it.

She told herself, at first, that she was just imagining the footsteps outside the door. That it was just her mind playing tricks on her—it was certainly doing that an awful lot lately. But then she heard the knob begin to turn, and the faintest hints of breathing on the other side of the door, and with a deep gasp that surprised even herself, she spun around to face it.

Or, more accurately, to face _him._

The boy looking back at her with the multi-colored spiky hair that looked so natural but she could never quite get used to. She let out her breath in a sigh, not entirely relieved.

"Yuugi …"

He blinked at her, once, twice, those big violet eyes that had stayed the same and yet changed so very much. His school jacket hung off his shoulders, one of his arms out of the sleeves and one in. He stood in the doorway, and she stood at his desk, and for such a long time, they just looked at one another in silence.

"Mama?" he almost sputtered out, but seemed to catch himself in the last second. His voice was quiet, a little dull, and he didn't even try to smile at her. Though she couldn't particularly blame him for that.

She put her hands in front of her, and she realized that she had completely forgotten to set down his pants. She swallowed and cleared her throat, then held them out in a gesture far too skittish for her tastes. She was his mother, wasn't she? This was her son. Just her son.

"Here. I fixed your … pants."

"Oh."

The words broke him out of that trance he seemed to be in, and she smiled a little at the more familiar expression he gave her. He nodded and let her drop the pants in his arms. He ran a finger over the part she had hemmed—she was surprised he even managed to notice—looked back up at her, and went quiet.

Silence.

She still stood a meter away. It was close enough to get a good look at him, the first clear look in full she had gotten since he returned.

Yes. He was still her son. He was still the same boy she had known since before he was born, the same boy she had helped to raise, even if she sometimes wondered if he knew she was there if he needed her. He looked back at her with big eyes sparkling with not as much innocence, and swirling with a darkness that made her cringe and want so badly to help, even though she knew she couldn't.

She gave him a full look-over. At the black shirt he liked so much and the jacket he had now shed and tossed to the floor—how many times had she told him not to do that?—and the pair of pants nearly identical to the ones she had mended and—

She blinked.

"Your … pendant."

He did not flinch like she had expected him to, like she had. He looked at her, and he looked down at himself, then back at her again. He nodded.

"Yeah," he muttered, and the word held such quiet acceptance that it made her suspicious all by itself. He didn't say anything else.

She held her hands close to her chest, like she sometimes did when she knew something had to be done, and yet she didn't have the courage to do so. Once upon a time she would have given him a gentle whack on the head and insisted to know what was going on. And yet something kept her. She could handle rebellious teenagers. She could handle annoying grandfathers, to some extent.

And yet she could not handle the silent, strange behavior of her own son, who stood right before her, while she stood there unable to do a thing.

She let out a breath. "Yuugi … what is it?"

He furrowed his brow and quirked his head. "What's what?"

"You …" The words caught in her throat, and she swallowed and glanced around the room. "_You, _Yuugi. You come back from this trip and you don't tell me anything at all and that, that _pendant, _you wouldn't part with that for anything in the world!"

He paused. He just looked at her at first, and very slowly, his eyes fell upon the spot on his middle where that gold pendant had always rested. His lips twitched into a smile. A smile that made her want to cry.

"Yeah … nothing in the world."

And as if that somehow answered every question in the world, he gave a slow, small nod.

She tried not to reach out and grab him by the shoulders, no matter how much she wanted to.

"Yuugi …"

There was so much more she wanted to say. So much more she wanted to do in that very moment. She wanted to scream and cry and make everything alright with some magic she knew she did not possess. She wanted to beg him to tell her what was wrong, to tell her how she could fix it, so she could do something other than just stand around useless. She wanted to curse her husband a million times over for not being there, for not being there with her, with their _son, _when he most needed them.

But she didn't do any of that. She looked at him, and he looked back at her with an expression so horrendously confused. The feelings inside her boiled and bubbled and grew, until at last, she felt that the tears which had not yet surfaced might spill if she didn't let those feelings out.

She closed her eyes, stepped forward, and drew her son into a tight and caring hug.

She felt him stiffen. She felt him not hug back. But for the life of her she didn't care. She squeezed him tighter, she squeezed him to her so tight that nothing could ever take him away and nothing could ever hurt him. They could take away everything. They could take away her husband on his business trips and they could take away her now-lost ability to fix anything with a bandage and a kiss. But they could not, and never would she let them, take away her son.

He was still so short and small in her arms, and she imagined, if only for an instant, that he was still young enough to talk to her, young enough for her to be able to listen. Before the pendant and the complexities and blood on his sleeves, before he would come home with scrapes and bruises no one could ever stop. When all that mattered was his games and his smile, and nothing could break into that joy.

"I love you, Yuugi," she whispered, and even when she felt him flinch at the open statement she had not let herself speak in years, she held him still. "And I will _always _be your mother."

Yuugi did not say anything in response. He did not say he loved her, too.

But after nearly a minute of silence and quiet pain, she heard the light thump of the pants he held falling to the ground, and she felt both his arms slip around her neck and hug her back.

She let one tear, and only one, slip down her cheek, and she just stood there, smiling, holding her son, promising herself a million times over that she would never, ever lose him again.


End file.
